April 2007

April 30, 2007

Jeremy Goodwin: [explaining his fears of his upcoming trip to meet Natalie's family] I'm Jewish. And her family is, you know, incredibly not. Which isn't by the way any sort of a problem for me, but I do think it might be a problem for them, because, after all there are those who think I killed their Lord, Jesus Christ. Not me directly mind you, I didn't drive the getaway car or anything. In fact, my family's from Latvia so we've got a pretty solid alibi.

--Sports Night, "Sally" (2/23/99)

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The other night, St. Mark's Church in Morrell Park had another one of its monthly Family Movie Nights. I tag along and help out with the projector and the sound system. It's kind of jury-rigged at this point but it gets the job done; in another couple of months maybe I'll hit the church up for better-integrated equipment.

Earlier in the day, the city brought a Dumpster to the church so that students from a local college could help the church clean out part of the parish hall to provide a space for the Guardian Angels, so they'd have a "home base" in the neighborhood. The Dumpster was still there at the end of the day, and since it still had space in it, some of the church folk decided to keep throwing stuff into it.

So after the movie (Happy Feet, which was pretty cute; I'd never seen it before), when I'd packed all my stuff up and put it into my car, I went back inside to say good night. One of the church elders was struggling with something and asked me to help out.

She was carrying a near-life-size image of Jesus in plywood. I think he was supposed to be represented as holding his hands out forward in a "bring the children to me" kind of pose, but instead his arms were straight out to the sides, as though he were back up on the cross. I think the whole thing was intended to be welcoming, but everyone agreed instead that it was a little disturbing. She asked me to bring it out to the Dumpster.

I said, "You're not asking me to throw out the Jesus just because I'm not a member of this church, are you?" She laughed and said no. I picked it up and wow. It was awkward to handle. I started to wonder if I was going to fall down three times before I made it to the Dumpster.

I got it to the street and alley-ooped it up and over the side of the Dumpster. Of course, on the first attempt it nearly came back down and clobbered me on the head.

I still have to wonder if, one day in the future, I'm going to get to the Pearly Gates, and St. Peter is going to fix a wary eye on me: "Saay, aren't you the guy who threw out the Jesus forty-five years ago?"

April 27, 2007

Dr. Cox: I don't know what to tell you, there, Bobbo. Either this kid has a light bulb up his butt or his colon has a great idea.

—Scrubs, "My Office" (9/7/04)

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When planning the move, we started to think about whether we should get some new furniture for the Wee One. We made the final decision right after her grandparents decided that they were going to buy her a new set of furniture. Hey, who are we to complain?

So we gave some stuff to the people renting the house and got rid of other stuff. At this point she has a rudimentary dresser, a bed, and a lamp. The other furniture was ordered somewhere in Pennsylvania and they're still building it, or growing the tree, or whatever. It's not in her room, is all I know.

So she decides that she's going to put her lamp on the floor next to the bed, rather than on the dresser. I don't know, something about a night light. The lamp has a compact fluorescent bulb in it, the kind that's all twisty, and no lampshade.

Thursday morning we're awakened by a crash and a scream. GF gets up immediately and before she's all the way into the room she tells me I need to get up. This is an hour before I'd ordinarily wake up, so I'm not so much with the being conscious thing.

Apparently she tripped and fell directly atop the lamp. The bulb shattered and gave her a three-inch laceration on the left side of her ribcage. Now, Wee One tends to be a little histrionic so it's pretty important to keep her as calm as possible. My side of this is to be as calm myself as I can, make everything pretty casual, that kind of thing. But clearly she's going to need a stitch or two.

Or ten.

That was the magic number. GF took her to GBMC and they put in ten stitches to keep all of Wee One's insides, inside. I wound up covering a meeting at GF's school before zooming over to my school to take care of one of my own meetings. The excitement never stops, I tell you.

April 25, 2007

Captain Renault: Realizing the importance of the case, my men are rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.

—Casablanca (1942)

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Recently a student in my school was suspended. Not only was he suspended, though, it was a proposed long-term suspension because he'd assaulted a teacher.

Now, according to the law, if the action that prompts a suspension is directly related to a student's disability, the suspension is overturned and the student is returned to his school. Unless, that is, it can be documented that the student poses a potential danger to himself and/or to others. And such was the case for this particular student.

We're lucky in that this student's mom is on the same page that we are; she recognizes that he needs a special program and we're nearing the end of the process that sets that up. Unfortunately, however, this happened in between. That's both bad news (complicates the whole process) and good news (more documentation that he needs the special program, plus they temporarily placed him exactly where we want him to go).

When a student in Special Education goes out for a long-term suspension, BCPSS rules say that you have to have a meeting to determine the manifestation thing, plus if you document the danger to self/others, you have to get the parent to sign off on sending the student to the alternative setting. As I said, mom was in agreement with us, but she couldn't attend the meeting itself. Now, without her signature, the boy comes back to the school and nobody (including mom) wants that.

So the School Social Worker and I decide we need to make a home visit to secure mom's autograph on this paperwork. She gets the directions from Mapquest, I make a bunch of copies for mom and for the suspension office, etc. and off we go in my car.

As we make the turn onto the student's street, we start looking for the correct house number. In the block ahead we spot a couple of police vehicles blocking the street.

"I think that's his house," the social worker says.

"No no, it can't be. It's probably a door or two down," I reply, recognizing by now that the police cars are, indeed, on his block. I park the car and we walk the last hundred feet.

Well. Three cop cars. One paddy wagon. About a half-dozen officers. And four young adult males in handcuffs sitting on the front steps of the student's house. Naturally, we're intercepted by an officer: "Can I help you?"

I introduce us and, before I explain that we need to talk to mom, he interrupts. "Well, this is a crime scene right now. It's a pretty bad crime scene. Nobody can go in or out." He gestures to a minivan behind him, the side door open and a general mess inside. "In fact, this van is a crime scene. You shouldn't even be here." We decide we're going to try again later, when maybe the cops are no longer there. We're worried about the welfare of the student and his mom, but nobody's giving up any information.

Until, that is, we start to leave. The front door opens and the student leans out and gives us a big smile and a wave. "HI!"

We wave back and say hello. At least he's all right.

Now I have to call the suspension office and explain to them that we did go through diligent effort to secure mom's signature, but were thwarted by the Baltimore City Police Department. The person in charge of his case agrees to try to intercede with her boss over the delay. We decide to make another trip in the afternoon.

We get there in the afternoon and the student is on the front steps of the house. The police are gone; the minivan is gone. Mom wasn't aware that we were there earlier. She tells us who got arrested but doesn't tell us why. It's pretty clear that she's disgusted with him, though. She and I walk through all the paperwork. Meanwhile someone else comes up to the house and mom addresses her, telling her that she'd tried to call to tell her what happened that morning. The other person isn't quite getting the details when finally the student helps out: "Face got locked up today."

The social worker looks at mom. "'Face'? His name is 'Face'?"

Mom: "Yeah, well, he has a girl face but he doesn't like to be called that, so everyone just calls him 'Face'."

This story is funnier in retrospect. It was kind of scary at the time.

April 19, 2007

Reggie Hammond: All right, knock this shit off! I HAVE BEEN HAVING A VERY BAD DAY! I just got out of jail this morning! Already I've been shot at, I was on a bus that flipped over seventeen times, bitch tried to stab me in the bathroom, and somebody blew up my Porsche! I am in a BAD goddamn mood!

--Another 48 Hours (1990)

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See? I could tell some cool stories about Florida. Instead I'm going to complain about how much it sucked to return to work.

Right before the break my boss told me that he wasn't coming back from his vacation until Monday night, and would I cover a meeting for him that morning? Sure, why not.

GF left early that morning--before I got up, in fact--and, because of the school's location, I didn't stop off for breakfast. I get to the school and, per BCPSS protocol, I go into the main office to sign in. The secretary is on the phone but she recognizes me and doesn't bother stopping her conversation. I sign in and go to the Special Education office.

There are three people in the room. One of them is the school psychologist. Before I get a chance to say anything she launches into a big thing about how she didn't like the way I spoke to the team at the last meeting I attended there, how I talked as though she didn't know what she was talking about, she didn't appreciate it, blah blah blahblahblahblahwhatever.

This is the first thing that anyone has said to me on my first day back after Spring Break.

I stand there, barely listening after the first few seconds, and when she finally stops, I say to her, "Good morning, nice to see you." She, missing the hint, replies, "Well, I wish I could say the same."

As it turns out, the meeting is taking place because the parent is remarkably upset with the school and reportedly wants her child transferred to a private agency because he's making no progress. During the meeting, Mom and I had a long chat, along with the classroom teacher and the principal. The other people there participated as well, but we pretty much dominated the conversation. It basically came out that she didn't feel that the school was communicating with her and it wasn't so much that the boy wasn't progressing so much as it was that she had no idea how much progress he was (or wasn't) making. In short, during the meeting we got the whole thing smoothed over and we didn't have to re-write the IEP for the student. The school psychologist, curiously enough, didn't say an awful lot to advance the conversation.

I'm sure Courtney will agree with this: it's incredibly impressive how "great" you are when you agree with the IEP team and how "unprofessional" you are when you don't. This was the beginning of a week that has been marginal at best.

April 11, 2007

So I'm sitting here, right now, outside a Panera Bread in Florida, catching up on email when my phone rings. It's GF; she's been having trouble using the computer at home. Chances are, she's just impatient because she's using the laptop and it's kind of slow. Anyway, she's working on a paper for school that, if I understand things correctly, was due on Friday. No, wait, that's not right. It was due on TUESDAY, but she got an extension till this past Friday. So now, of course, we're in Emergency Mode and everything has to be done nownownownowNOWDAMMIT.

Her problem is that she's having trouble getting to her email so that she can send some information to the professor. So she asks me to relay it to her through my email address, instead. I'm only too happy to comply and compose the email, using a WiFi connection at the Panera, getting information from GF over the cell phone, so that it can be emailed to a point about a mile from home.

April 08, 2007

Bullwinkle: [pointing to Florida on a map] Here it is: Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. Rocket J. Squirrel: Bullwinkle, that's Florida! Bullwinkle: Well, if they keep adding new states all the time how can you expect me to keep up?

--The Bullwinkle Show (1961)

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Usually I get to spend the Christmas break with my family in Florida. This past year, however, we decided to have a Baltimore holiday. I don't know, for me it was a little depressing. On the other hand, I've never done New Year's Eve in Baltimore before. The level of excitement was such that I think I'll go back to Florida this year.

Anyway. I've been planning to take a long weekend for awhile. First it was going to be late January/early February, then sometime in March. And the business with buying the house, then the delay with the closing, kept putting it off. In the meantime, my grandmother went into the hospital with congestive heart failure, then she came out again, and last week she went in again, this time for treatment of a hiatal hernia. She came out yesterday, so all is apparently well at this point, but her being in and out like this is a little worrisome. So in a little while (when the laundry dries), I'll be packing up and driving down for a few days. Next post will likely be from the Sunshine State. And frankly, I can use the break.

April 06, 2007

Loretta Tortelli: We didn't like our old neighborhood, so we just drove our house to a better one.

--Cheers, "Loathe and Marriage" (2/4/93)

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If only it were that easy.

Last Wednesday was our moving day. We didn't have a lot of time to get all our stuff packed, so we were still working on getting things into boxes even on Tuesday night.

The movers finally arrived at about 9:30. One of them looked a little like Snay, but I won't hold it against him. He had two guys with him; one was African-American and one was Hispanic, so we had a full-spectrum moving crew. All of them looked pretty young, like they could be in college. They looked around, did some hemming and hawing, and finally got down to work.

I have to say that I didn't necessarily have any bad feelings early on, although I did think that the truck was a little on the small side. But since GF had talked to them I figured that they had some sort of idea of what they were getting into.

Well...they took a huge amount of time getting stuff into the truck, which I suppose figures when you've got a company getting paid by the hour. GF told me that night that there was a lot of "wow, this is heavy" and similar complaining throughout the day. I have to take her word for that; I didn't maintain a lot of contact with these guys as I was in another room packing stuff. But what the hell? Isn't this your job, guys? Didn't you come expecting to lift and move stuff?

Midday and GF tells me that I have to go to the bank and get money. It turns out that these guys take only cash. OK, that's a little weird but maybe they've gotten burned by bad checks in the past. So I hit the bank and take out what I figure will be enough money to pay them and give each guy a tip besides, and maybe have a little cash left over.

The truck is full. There's still stuff in the house. Plus, there's a storage space they were supposed to empty as well. They're not even done packing and we're at 2:30 PM. But there's no more room in the truck, so off we're going to go.

There's no good (i.e., fast, direct) way from Morrell Park to Parkville. What we did was go up I-95 and through the Fort McHenry Tunnel, then took Moravia Road to Harford Road and into our new neighborhood. So we're not talking about horrible streets, here. This becomes important in a moment.

The guys start unpacking the truck and GF marks the rooms with sticky notes on the doorways. This, apparently, did not help, as there are boxes everywhere located everywhere else: Kitchen stuff in the basement, Daughter's stuff in the dining room and so forth. GF told me that the Hispanic guy barely spoke English, so maybe he gets a pass. But when the boxes are all marked, you have to figure that he can at least match words. And then comes the coup de grace. The dining room table is broken.

I'm not talking about a crack or a separated joint. I'm talking, the table went into the truck with four legs and came out of it with NONE. The table has these two pedestals and, at the bottom, are these arced pieces of wood that curve down to form the feet. The wood was shattered through these feet. It's completely irreparable. I ask the Snay-looking guy how this gets rectified, and he tells me that there's nothing he can do because it didn't happen while they were physically handling the table. It doesn't matter that it broke in transit, apparently. Then he starts reviewing the invoice with me. It comes to $1150 and he wants to be paid right away, even though the truck isn't empty yet. (I'll say this, though: they're billing me up until about fifteen minutes earlier.)

Wait a minute, I say. What about the table? Something needs to be done there. Even if it didn't break as a result of you guys dropping it or whatever, the fact that it broke on the truck says to me that it was packed improperly. This isn't right and it needs to be addressed somehow.

I get on the phone to his boss and he asks me, "Did you take the extra insurance?" I said I didn't know anything about "extra" insurance, aren't you guys insured already? He tells me to have the guy call the office. By the time I get outside, his cell phone is already ringing. He spends several minutes standing at the front of the truck, then another several minutes in the cab.

The bottom line for this guy is, they're going to knock $50 off the total cost because according to the contract, their liability is 50 cents per pound or $50, whichever is less, unless extra insurance is taken out at the time of hiring. I go back into the house and try to call the boss again.

In the meantime (I don't know about this as I'm on the phone), the guy has closed and locked the back of the truck. GF's mother is now arguing with him as well as GF. As I get back outside, GF's mom picks up a dolly and starts brandishing it at him. There's more "open the goddamn truck" and "don't you threaten me" and other dick-measuring stunts between the two of them. I can't raise the boss again. It's 5:30 by now. The guy says something about the contract and I ask to see it. He holds the clipboard in front of my face, refusing to let it go.

Now, I'm angry but I'm not about to do anything stupid. I can't see the whole thing because of the way he's holding it, so I tell him, "Relax, I'm not going to tear the thing up or whatever." He responds, "Yeah, I've heard that one before." I just give him a dirty look and take the clipboard from him. I sit on the front steps and read the thing about the 6 cents/fifty dollars deal, and all the other stuff. Finally I ask for a pen. I note on the form that insurance was not offered or even discussed until I called with a problem, and I pay the guy. He unlocks the truck and they finish unloading. Meanwhile, I have to go back to Morrell Park and get one of the cats.

As I return, I call the house and GF tells me that they just left. What's more, one of them actually hinted at maybe getting a tip.

You want a tip? Here's a tip. Don't fuck up the client's furniture, asshat.

And here's the other thing I asked GF: You grew up watching cartoons on TV featuring the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote's numerous failed attempts to catch him. Don't you know better than to hire a company called Acme?

This story isn't over. GF has her attorney on it but there isn't much else to say at this point.

The Cast

Our former next-door neighbors. Their given names begin with neither S nor B, although the names that everyone calls them do begin with S and B. Go figure.

Wee One

Wife's daughter, who is almost eighteen years old. An artist and aspiring actress who spends an inordinate amount of time getting physical therapy. She'll be starting college in the fall. We'll be in debtor's prison by the spring.

Daughter

My 25-year-old daughter, a college graduate from SUNY New Paltz and working in the world of theater, making props. Currently her work can be seen on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Durham, with the Playmakers.